Try moving to Canada. Seriously. Once you get on those lists it is almost impossible to get off. The kid is lucky that the government told him he is on the list and not shipped off to Guantanamo already. Most people never know they are on a watch list. I hate to sound pessimistic but this is the truth.
Health care is so expensive primarily because of medical malpractice lawsuits.
I am sure it has nothing to do with drug and medical equipment companies gouging customers (physicians and hospitals) who then gouge their customers (us). Prescription drugs and medical equipment companies are viewed as stock market cash cows, not noble institutions that help humanity. Patents, Slashdot's favorite arch-nemesis, is partly to blame for this. But I digress.
Health care costs so much here because it can. The fat cats at the top of the food chain are millionaires and we the poor shmucks pay for it. Capitalism is good, but not when it interferes with basic human necesseties. Why is it that every other developed nation and even some third world countries like Mexico can afford decent health care? Their CEOs and stock market investors are not greedy SOBs willing to let people suffer and die in poverty to meet medical expenses just for a few extra dollars.
According to that site, Cleveland has 3,698 people and a median income of $16,811. Something is wrong with that. Add a few more zeros after the population and increase the income by about $10,000 and that would be more accurate. I know for a fact that cannot be correct.
And I certainly don't want to store it in a closet somewhere and have to lug it out and wire it up just to play some Doom or SimCity 2000 (my favorite DOS games).
There are plenty of source ports of Doom to modern operating systems. Besides running on both Linux and Windows, ZDoom also offers high resolutions and Quake-style key bindings. I highly recommend it.
The Doom community is still alive and kicking after ten years. Try Doomworld and my favorite, Doomnewsgroups.
I develop software for Windows using MinGW and MSys. They provide everything I need for development, apart from the IDE, and this release from Microsoft doesn't include that. The Visual C++ compiler is good, but it isn't extrordinary. Why use it over the open source MinGW tools?
I develop OSS for Windows with MinGW and MSys too. Microsoft's tools have several advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages: executables tend to be much smaller because of less static linkage and fewer extranneous debug symbols; debugging is far easier and more powerful; writing libraries as opposed to stand-alone applications is much easier; the other tools in the box are very powerful and useful (think of all the little VC++ helper applications like Spy++); the resource editor is much better than writing.rc files by hand and much better than anything the OSS community has come up with so far; and with the latest.NET versions of their C++ compiler the compiler and libraries are far more standards compliant than they used to be (and more than people like to admit).
Disadvantages: GUI tools (i.e. the IDE and debugger) are not free; there is some confusion about distributing OSS built with their tools (those EULAs are inpenetrable); their tools encourage use of non-standard Microsoft extensions (this is why I do not use their wizards to start applications); and portability is a minor issue. With GCC's g++ I can write for that compiler on multiple platforms, but Microsoft's C++ compiler has minor quirks that exist on a single platform. I like to keep conditional compilation to a minimum.
With MS's latest C++ compiler (and with newer Os's), you need "\r\n" to make a new line. This drove me nuts when I first started doing it. Now, it's not so bad.
That is weird, I do not have this problem. The I/O layer should translate newlines for you. All I ever use in Windows programs (console and GUI) is '\n' and it ouputs "\r\n" as well as reversing it on input. This is in both MinGW and Visual C++
I just signed up for the Standard plan. Now I find out, even though I'm a mandrake club member, I can't download some ISO's. Only Silver and higher can. And the ISO's I get are the public release version. How freaking ABSURD!
Being a member means you get releases sooner, and you get better access to updated packages and custom packages. Generally speaking they only release bugfixes publically. Members get "real" upgraded packages.
The main reason to be a member is to give something back. Free software may be free, but there is nothing wrong with pitching in some cash to help out.
wxWidgets is a decent toolkit. I do mean to look more closely at it, but Qt is the filet mignon of the GUI toolkit world. wxWidgets was a bit rough around the edges last time I looked at it, but I hear there was a major revision since then. At least the main developer said he had one planned. The last time I looked at it, it was still called wxWindows. That shows my age, eh?
Anyway, free GUI toolkits is one topic that Slashdot covers sometimes. This article is about Qt specifically. I do not like the attitude that the Qt people had in the article, saying there is no Windows/OSS community. I take umbrage at that because I am part of that "nonexistant" community.
You look at windows and Visual Basic and Visual C, those are all anyone would ever need in windows land.
Wrong. There are plenty of non-Microsoft tools available. To name a few open source or OSS-friendly tools: ActivePerl, MinGW, CygWin, Visual-MinGW, GTK+, Eclipse, Java/NetBeans, et al. I use most of those to develop Windows applications rather than Microsoft's offerings. The only thing missing is a good GUI toolkit that is open source (sorry, Java GUIs are fugly), or at least open-source compatible, and Qt fits the bill. Unfortunately, TrollTech refuses to release a free version for Windows because there is no community (bullshit) and trolls like you think Microsoft makes the only decent Windows tools (bullshit).
If projects like OpenOffice and Mozilla can have faith in Windows users and developers, why not TrollTech? TrollTech could help the OSS community make huge strides toward Linux adoption if they would help bridge the gap.
Is unreasonable. You are assuming I would reuse code but not saying if its in house or between companies. In my stats class this question would be deemed unethical and slanted. Thus, the results of the survey would be thrown out.
My Probability and Statistics professor, with two PhDs (one in statistics), went on a tirade one class about surveys, especially anonymous online surveys. He said that you must carefully choose who answers the survey so it is an accurate representation of the population. He said that online surveys make no differentiation about who answers, and this can cause an unseen bias in the data. He does not trust surveys like this, even if thousands of people respond.
That class was cool. I earned a B, but I got an A thanks to tests with 150 points and only 100 of them count. I love 50% extra credit!
Someone's got to pay, we don't like in a Socialist world, people (even coders) have to eat...
Ideally, F/OSS and proprietary software would coexist relatively peacefully, each with a good chunk of the market. This ensures everyone has access to good software without having to pirate it, and it ensures programmers get paid. Granted current Linux companies sell services to make up the difference, and some developers get paid (e.g. Linus) by companies so they can afford to develop free software.
I think that with OSS companies like Red Hat selling services and traditional closed-source companies like Microsoft selling their products, both sides of the camp have incentive to produce good software affordably, and everyone gets fed.
I feel that domain names are similar to titles. When you get a title for a house, car, or boat, you provide a valid residence address and it is both printed on the title and made part of the public record. Is that a bad thing too? No, I believe it is another form of identification that helps to protect one's property rights.
If another John Gaughan decided to hijack my property, be it one of my domain names or the legal rights to the car in my driveway, I have more legal recourse: my name AND address. It identifies that title as belonging to ME, because my car's title does not have my SSN on it. I think domain names should work the same way to protect my legal property rights.
Additionally, valid address info helps us track down spammers, scammers, child pornographers, etc. If someone owns the domain name "nakedchildren.com" and dishes out child pornography, it is easier to bust down his door if we have a valid address and do not need to subpeona web hosting information. This information can also be used for bad (I.e. Big Brother), but given that the government already knows where I live (titles, taxes, and I am a federal government employee), I do not see how this is an issue.
Anyway, I wonder what Microsoft's view will be on this. I am sure this is an "unfortunate" day for "freedom of choice," because they chose not to use Microsoft's software. Much like the DOJ's comments after the EU judgment, I am sure the U.S. government will find this an "unfortunate" day for capitalism and try to pressure the Asians not to go through with this plan. Luckily, the Chinese have big enough balls to ignore the U.S., and ironically enough, bring freedom to the motherland. Freedom of software, that is.
Hopefully these Asian countries, with their billions of people, will create a market force to be reckoned with. If India comes on board too, that surely could create a feedback loop with the U.S. and pressure more businesses and government agencies to switch.
What surprised me is that Alabama is not the worst state for tech, Mississippi is. The two states are at the bottom in terms of per capita income, quality of the schools, etc. I hate living here, but I imagine the Air Force base here in Montgomery is one of the reasons why it is not last on the list, that and NASA up in Huntsville. But I dare anyone to try and find public sector technology businesses besides Best Buy.
In a related note, I have a friend who removes the security stickers and puts them in his pants while in the store. Then he walks out and is accosted several times - each time proving that he has nothing stolen from the store. That is his small way of fighting back.
I used to work at CompUSA in a previous life, and we would take those stickers and sneak them onto peoples' shoes, either putting the sticky side up on the floor, or just being really sneaky when they weren't looking. The managers told us something like 75% of all their theft was from inside jobs, so they were extra careful about employees setting off the alarms when leaving at quitting time. Eventually, after having the manager search every single employee one night, they started cracking down on us jokesters... they had to ruin all the fun!
But up until that point, I'll handle the tags myself.
Some of these tags are so small you would never find them. If you can handle them, please do, and share your methods with the rest of us. I for one do NOT welcome our new RFID overlords...
I have a loyalty card at one and only one store. I generally go there only when my regular store does not carry a specific product or is just out of stock and I need something. In any event, I always make sure to buy weird, non-related items that show I am a sociopath, just to fuck with their computer that tracks all of this stuff. Anyway, they do not have a correct address for me, so I do not get their mailings. At least until the neoconservatives' conspiracy theory becomes real with TIA, then they will dig down even to loyalty card databases... argh...
Thankfully, RFID will only be used to track palettes and crates of stuff at the store level. At first. Eventually Big Brother will want one implanted in my ass so they know whenever I take a dump. To fight terrorism. Hey, they invented excuses about stuff like the Bay of Pigs, I imagine they will keep on inventing 100% homegrown all-American Bullshit (tm) to push this crap on us.
I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.
I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.
Link to a URL with a specific bit of text between the "a" tags. If enough people do this, search engines such as Google equate the text and URL, so a search for the text brings up the link.
(regarding your logs, maybe you are loggin to much!:)
I do not log too much. Apache writes the web server logs, not me.
I was trying to say that despite having nothing useful on my site, I get a ton of hits, and a whole bunch of those are bots and spiders.
Maybe now NASA will stop dilly-dallying around and get some new technology other than the outdated space shuttle.
I am confident that whatever "new technology" NASA gets will be a compromise between various mission requirements that the new shuttle will be billions of dollars overbudget and will do nothing the current shuttle cannot do, while being more unsafe.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that while Russia is now a democracy, they are still communist. Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his... oh, he is still technically alive? Crap.
Thank you, I just added another Google bomb to my web site.
Google and every other spider and spam bot in the universe crawls my site at least a million times a day (seriously, my web logs are about 80 kb/day and half of that is bots) looking for links... helloooooo Google bombs!
If you think this post had alot of obscenities, you should have seen the email I sent to salon.
Salon writes good articles for the most part, and they have had rough financial times. If ignoring an "internet commercial" means they get money to keep writing articles such as this one, so be it. I do not like it, but I understand they are just playing the system. I understand economics well enough to know that this is a necessary evil.
Now, as to your comment, please try to be constructive. I communicate with companies and my Congressmen on a regular basis, both email and snail mail. Some of the issues are very dear to me, such as the letter I wrote to Dell berating them for laying off American call center employees to outsource to India. Not once in my letter did I swear or come across as uneducated, unintelligent, or uncaring. Swearing and other vulgar language does nothing to help your cause. Be constructive. Do not just say "ads suck," provide them with a solution to your perceived problem. I think you will be hard pressed to do this, however. Their solution is very good for their company and not too intrusive to their readers, although it is intrusive.
I have found that the DoNotUseIE.patch file has upgraded it to 100% open standards compliance, and this cannot be overridden by any future version of IE or other Microsoft extensions.
Microsoft lawyers will contact you shortly about your violation of the DMCA. Applying this patch violates their copyright. All your browser are belong to us!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this will change when I finish school next year, but damn, I would kill for a salary of $13/hour at the moment.
I make about $9.60 an hour as an enlisted Air Force programmer. It can always be worse.
Try moving to Canada. Seriously. Once you get on those lists it is almost impossible to get off. The kid is lucky that the government told him he is on the list and not shipped off to Guantanamo already. Most people never know they are on a watch list. I hate to sound pessimistic but this is the truth.
Health care is so expensive primarily because of medical malpractice lawsuits.
I am sure it has nothing to do with drug and medical equipment companies gouging customers (physicians and hospitals) who then gouge their customers (us). Prescription drugs and medical equipment companies are viewed as stock market cash cows, not noble institutions that help humanity. Patents, Slashdot's favorite arch-nemesis, is partly to blame for this. But I digress.
Health care costs so much here because it can. The fat cats at the top of the food chain are millionaires and we the poor shmucks pay for it. Capitalism is good, but not when it interferes with basic human necesseties. Why is it that every other developed nation and even some third world countries like Mexico can afford decent health care? Their CEOs and stock market investors are not greedy SOBs willing to let people suffer and die in poverty to meet medical expenses just for a few extra dollars.
Yahoo's Neighborhood Profiles section, searchable by zip code, has lots of nice data if you're pricing a job.
According to that site, Cleveland has 3,698 people and a median income of $16,811. Something is wrong with that. Add a few more zeros after the population and increase the income by about $10,000 and that would be more accurate. I know for a fact that cannot be correct.
And I certainly don't want to store it in a closet somewhere and have to lug it out and wire it up just to play some Doom or SimCity 2000 (my favorite DOS games).
There are plenty of source ports of Doom to modern operating systems. Besides running on both Linux and Windows, ZDoom also offers high resolutions and Quake-style key bindings. I highly recommend it.
The Doom community is still alive and kicking after ten years. Try Doomworld and my favorite, Doom newsgroups.
I develop software for Windows using MinGW and MSys. They provide everything I need for development, apart from the IDE, and this release from Microsoft doesn't include that. The Visual C++ compiler is good, but it isn't extrordinary. Why use it over the open source MinGW tools?
I develop OSS for Windows with MinGW and MSys too. Microsoft's tools have several advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages: executables tend to be much smaller because of less static linkage and fewer extranneous debug symbols; debugging is far easier and more powerful; writing libraries as opposed to stand-alone applications is much easier; the other tools in the box are very powerful and useful (think of all the little VC++ helper applications like Spy++); the resource editor is much better than writing .rc files by hand and much better than anything the OSS community has come up with so far; and with the latest .NET versions of their C++ compiler the compiler and libraries are far more standards compliant than they used to be (and more than people like to admit).
Disadvantages: GUI tools (i.e. the IDE and debugger) are not free; there is some confusion about distributing OSS built with their tools (those EULAs are inpenetrable); their tools encourage use of non-standard Microsoft extensions (this is why I do not use their wizards to start applications); and portability is a minor issue. With GCC's g++ I can write for that compiler on multiple platforms, but Microsoft's C++ compiler has minor quirks that exist on a single platform. I like to keep conditional compilation to a minimum.
With MS's latest C++ compiler (and with newer Os's), you need "\r\n" to make a new line. This drove me nuts when I first started doing it. Now, it's not so bad.
That is weird, I do not have this problem. The I/O layer should translate newlines for you. All I ever use in Windows programs (console and GUI) is '\n' and it ouputs "\r\n" as well as reversing it on input. This is in both MinGW and Visual C++
I just signed up for the Standard plan. Now I find out, even though I'm a mandrake club member, I can't download some ISO's. Only Silver and higher can. And the ISO's I get are the public release version. How freaking ABSURD!
Being a member means you get releases sooner, and you get better access to updated packages and custom packages. Generally speaking they only release bugfixes publically. Members get "real" upgraded packages.
The main reason to be a member is to give something back. Free software may be free, but there is nothing wrong with pitching in some cash to help out.
Investigate wxWidgets.
wxWidgets is a decent toolkit. I do mean to look more closely at it, but Qt is the filet mignon of the GUI toolkit world. wxWidgets was a bit rough around the edges last time I looked at it, but I hear there was a major revision since then. At least the main developer said he had one planned. The last time I looked at it, it was still called wxWindows. That shows my age, eh?
Anyway, free GUI toolkits is one topic that Slashdot covers sometimes. This article is about Qt specifically. I do not like the attitude that the Qt people had in the article, saying there is no Windows/OSS community. I take umbrage at that because I am part of that "nonexistant" community.
You look at windows and Visual Basic and Visual C, those are all anyone would ever need in windows land.
Wrong. There are plenty of non-Microsoft tools available. To name a few open source or OSS-friendly tools: ActivePerl, MinGW, CygWin, Visual-MinGW, GTK+, Eclipse, Java/NetBeans, et al. I use most of those to develop Windows applications rather than Microsoft's offerings. The only thing missing is a good GUI toolkit that is open source (sorry, Java GUIs are fugly), or at least open-source compatible, and Qt fits the bill. Unfortunately, TrollTech refuses to release a free version for Windows because there is no community (bullshit) and trolls like you think Microsoft makes the only decent Windows tools (bullshit).
If projects like OpenOffice and Mozilla can have faith in Windows users and developers, why not TrollTech? TrollTech could help the OSS community make huge strides toward Linux adoption if they would help bridge the gap.
Is unreasonable. You are assuming I would reuse code but not saying if its in house or between companies. In my stats class this question would be deemed unethical and slanted. Thus, the results of the survey would be thrown out.
My Probability and Statistics professor, with two PhDs (one in statistics), went on a tirade one class about surveys, especially anonymous online surveys. He said that you must carefully choose who answers the survey so it is an accurate representation of the population. He said that online surveys make no differentiation about who answers, and this can cause an unseen bias in the data. He does not trust surveys like this, even if thousands of people respond.
That class was cool. I earned a B, but I got an A thanks to tests with 150 points and only 100 of them count. I love 50% extra credit!
Someone's got to pay, we don't like in a Socialist world, people (even coders) have to eat...
Ideally, F/OSS and proprietary software would coexist relatively peacefully, each with a good chunk of the market. This ensures everyone has access to good software without having to pirate it, and it ensures programmers get paid. Granted current Linux companies sell services to make up the difference, and some developers get paid (e.g. Linus) by companies so they can afford to develop free software.
I think that with OSS companies like Red Hat selling services and traditional closed-source companies like Microsoft selling their products, both sides of the camp have incentive to produce good software affordably, and everyone gets fed.
I feel that domain names are similar to titles. When you get a title for a house, car, or boat, you provide a valid residence address and it is both printed on the title and made part of the public record. Is that a bad thing too? No, I believe it is another form of identification that helps to protect one's property rights.
If another John Gaughan decided to hijack my property, be it one of my domain names or the legal rights to the car in my driveway, I have more legal recourse: my name AND address. It identifies that title as belonging to ME, because my car's title does not have my SSN on it. I think domain names should work the same way to protect my legal property rights.
Additionally, valid address info helps us track down spammers, scammers, child pornographers, etc. If someone owns the domain name "nakedchildren.com" and dishes out child pornography, it is easier to bust down his door if we have a valid address and do not need to subpeona web hosting information. This information can also be used for bad (I.e. Big Brother), but given that the government already knows where I live (titles, taxes, and I am a federal government employee), I do not see how this is an issue.
FYI, Daewood went bankrupt a few years ago.
Anyway, I wonder what Microsoft's view will be on this. I am sure this is an "unfortunate" day for "freedom of choice," because they chose not to use Microsoft's software. Much like the DOJ's comments after the EU judgment, I am sure the U.S. government will find this an "unfortunate" day for capitalism and try to pressure the Asians not to go through with this plan. Luckily, the Chinese have big enough balls to ignore the U.S., and ironically enough, bring freedom to the motherland. Freedom of software, that is.
Hopefully these Asian countries, with their billions of people, will create a market force to be reckoned with. If India comes on board too, that surely could create a feedback loop with the U.S. and pressure more businesses and government agencies to switch.
What surprised me is that Alabama is not the worst state for tech, Mississippi is. The two states are at the bottom in terms of per capita income, quality of the schools, etc. I hate living here, but I imagine the Air Force base here in Montgomery is one of the reasons why it is not last on the list, that and NASA up in Huntsville. But I dare anyone to try and find public sector technology businesses besides Best Buy.
In a related note, I have a friend who removes the security stickers and puts them in his pants while in the store. Then he walks out and is accosted several times - each time proving that he has nothing stolen from the store. That is his small way of fighting back.
I used to work at CompUSA in a previous life, and we would take those stickers and sneak them onto peoples' shoes, either putting the sticky side up on the floor, or just being really sneaky when they weren't looking. The managers told us something like 75% of all their theft was from inside jobs, so they were extra careful about employees setting off the alarms when leaving at quitting time. Eventually, after having the manager search every single employee one night, they started cracking down on us jokesters... they had to ruin all the fun!
But up until that point, I'll handle the tags myself.
Some of these tags are so small you would never find them. If you can handle them, please do, and share your methods with the rest of us. I for one do NOT welcome our new RFID overlords...
I have a loyalty card at one and only one store. I generally go there only when my regular store does not carry a specific product or is just out of stock and I need something. In any event, I always make sure to buy weird, non-related items that show I am a sociopath, just to fuck with their computer that tracks all of this stuff. Anyway, they do not have a correct address for me, so I do not get their mailings. At least until the neoconservatives' conspiracy theory becomes real with TIA, then they will dig down even to loyalty card databases... argh...
Thankfully, RFID will only be used to track palettes and crates of stuff at the store level. At first. Eventually Big Brother will want one implanted in my ass so they know whenever I take a dump. To fight terrorism. Hey, they invented excuses about stuff like the Bay of Pigs, I imagine they will keep on inventing 100% homegrown all-American Bullshit (tm) to push this crap on us.
I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.
I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.
What is a google bomb?
Link to a URL with a specific bit of text between the "a" tags. If enough people do this, search engines such as Google equate the text and URL, so a search for the text brings up the link.
(regarding your logs, maybe you are loggin to much! :)
I do not log too much. Apache writes the web server logs, not me.
I was trying to say that despite having nothing useful on my site, I get a ton of hits, and a whole bunch of those are bots and spiders.
Maybe now NASA will stop dilly-dallying around and get some new technology other than the outdated space shuttle.
I am confident that whatever "new technology" NASA gets will be a compromise between various mission requirements that the new shuttle will be billions of dollars overbudget and will do nothing the current shuttle cannot do, while being more unsafe.
Cynnicism, or realism? This is NASA, after all...
I can think of a LOT of reasons.
Such as...?
The first thing that comes to my mind is that while Russia is now a democracy, they are still communist. Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his... oh, he is still technically alive? Crap.
Thank you, I just added another Google bomb to my web site.
Google and every other spider and spam bot in the universe crawls my site at least a million times a day (seriously, my web logs are about 80 kb/day and half of that is bots) looking for links... helloooooo Google bombs!
If you think this post had alot of obscenities, you should have seen the email I sent to salon.
Salon writes good articles for the most part, and they have had rough financial times. If ignoring an "internet commercial" means they get money to keep writing articles such as this one, so be it. I do not like it, but I understand they are just playing the system. I understand economics well enough to know that this is a necessary evil.
Now, as to your comment, please try to be constructive. I communicate with companies and my Congressmen on a regular basis, both email and snail mail. Some of the issues are very dear to me, such as the letter I wrote to Dell berating them for laying off American call center employees to outsource to India. Not once in my letter did I swear or come across as uneducated, unintelligent, or uncaring. Swearing and other vulgar language does nothing to help your cause. Be constructive. Do not just say "ads suck," provide them with a solution to your perceived problem. I think you will be hard pressed to do this, however. Their solution is very good for their company and not too intrusive to their readers, although it is intrusive.
I have found that the DoNotUseIE.patch file has upgraded it to 100% open standards compliance, and this cannot be overridden by any future version of IE or other Microsoft extensions.
Microsoft lawyers will contact you shortly about your violation of the DMCA. Applying this patch violates their copyright. All your browser are belong to us!